Type News: Knäckebröd!

A hearty and crunchy morning to you! This week’s news and new type are a part of any complete meal, so dig in!

Spring is in the air and Canada Type has been busy freshening up a fair number of their more popular families. Included in their latest font crop is an emboldened Orpheus Pro, a condensed version of Hans van Maanen’s “Dutch Garamond” known as Aragon, as well as “gentler” variations of two space-saving sans faces — Wagner Round and Soft Press.

But there’s more in the land of Canadia than just new flavours of erstwhile fonts — there’s also a display face by the name of King Wood. Three solid weights of “gothic wood type with a Tuscan flair” — each sporting a optional unicase variation. A separate cut of simple, appropriate ornaments comes along for the ride in the form of King Wood Extras.

Piercing the clouds like one of the very first skyscrapers, Josip Kelava’s Metropolis 1920 echoes the streamlined, industrial vernacular of the Art Deco era. The condensed, twin-beam chassis is both airy and strong, providing this snappy-looking display face with a intriguing, intertwined look and a brash attitude. All that, and it’s free to boot.

New from the typographic team of José Scaglione and Veronika Burian comes Tablet Gothic — a comprehensive headline family. Building on traditional 19th century utility, this grotesque sans still manages to ooze personality and charm across its 42 styles, seven weights, and six widths.

Jeremy Tankard’s calligraphically influenced Fenland is packed with fascinating, angular shapes. Initially crafted from the brush, each weight has been pruned and tuned into contemporary sans forms that are both familiar and unexpected. Eye Magazine’s article Birth of a typeface offers a peek at Tankard’s preliminary sketches of Fenland and his development process.

Starting out as a versatile commissioned design for Men’s Health, Font Bureau’s Heron Sans and Heron Serif balance a draftsman-like, industrial framework with the buffed and polished detailing expected from the likes of Cyrus Highsmith. A robust twenty styles are included in each of these new families.

The sultry Ragazza Script is the latest lovely to swing into town from Chile’s Latinotype. Guille Vizzari’s “ornamental copperplate” style is modern and fluid — plus, there’s enough alternates, initials, fly-away swashes, and scenery-chewing contrast to keep everyone interested.

Finally, we have a solid serif companion to the Gaslight Type Foundry’s recently released ultra black display face. Quadratish Serif offers a similar cut of beef, this time with a side order of slab.

Don’t fill up on beef just yet! There’s also plenty of bread and butter to go around — a variety basket, even — in the shape of the news:

Marco Arment has added new typefaces to the latest version of Instapaper for iOS. These new typefaces look especially lovely on a “retina” display.

While we’re on the topic of retina displays, there has been some consternation about how the new iPad’s pixel density impacts designing for the web. Jeffrey Zeldman thinks type will save us.

Zeldman also mentions Type Butter, a new jQuery plugin that promises optical kerning on the web now — while we wait for better typographic support from web browsers.